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"Railroads in literature"
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The Case of the Crooked Clock and the Distracted Driver
From 2012 to 2014, the author led a research project about railway safety on the topic of \"SPAD\" occurrences, otherwise known as signals passed at danger. In Australia SPADs have been very problematic, and though none has caused any serious injury, over one thousand happen every year. In spite of the scholarly progress made in rail safety science, the industry still has a tendency to explain them through single-factor accounts of failure, which do not consider the system or the wider organizational behaviors. The research project found that organizational norms such as time pressure and poorly mediated controller-driver communications were significant causal factors for a majority of SPADs from the driver's perspective. As findings started to emerge, they attracted controversy and the project was presented with the problem of translating its findings to optimize uptake within a very traditional and reactive industry. Using a Victorian rhetoric and character references that have become part of the popular lexicon (Sherlock Holmes), and by injecting light-hearted humor into an eminently serious topic, the findings were disseminated in a short story called \"The Case of the Crooked Clock & the Distracted Driver.\" The findings have since gone on to inform a national SPAD Guideline by the Australian Rail Industry Safety Standards Board. This essay illustrates the efficacy of narrative in bringing about changes in policy in a significant real-world situation.
Journal Article
Journeys beyond the Pale
Journeys beyond the Pale is the first book to examine how Yiddish writers, from Mendele Moycher Sforim to Der Nister to the famed Sholem Aleichem, used motifs of travel to express their complicated relationship with modernization. The story of the Jews of the Pale of settlement encompasses current-day Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland.
eBook
Debugging : you can fix it!
\"Is something not working? Maybe you can debug it. Learn about the codes all around us\"--Amazon.com.
Book
Railway
In the nineteenth century, railways were viewed as a symbol of progress and confidence in technological modernity. In the twenty-first century, the frustrations of gridlocked traffic, record-high gas prices, and the looming fears of climate change have transformed the railway system once again into a symbol of hope that provides the possibility of an environmentally sustainable future. In Railway, George Revill examines the technology and politics of railway history, as well as related themes such as mobility, identity, design, marketing, and sustainability. In both practical and symbolic senses the cultural meanings of railways continue to play a role in how people organize and respond to modern environments, social problems, and technologies. Revill draws from art, literature, music, and film to illustrate how the railway carries meaning for all of us—creating connections and separations, detachment and involvement—from the routine commuter to the enthusiast. As Revill shows, railways inform our everyday language—from fast-track to side-track to going off the rails—and continue to fascinate us today. In this wide-ranging and well-illustrated look at railways across the globe, Revill ultimately reveals how central they are to our understanding of modern everyday life.
eBook
Canadian railroad trilogy
Portrays the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in a series of dreamlike paintings accompanied by the lyrics of Lightfoot's 1967 song commemorating Canada's centennial year.
Book
Trains, literature, and culture
Trains, Literature and Culture: Reading and Writing the Rails delves into the rich connections between rail travel and the creation of cultural products from short stories to novels, from photographs to travel guides, and from artistic manifestos of the avant-garde to Freud’s psychology. Each of the contributions engages in critical readings of textual or visual representations of trains across a wide spectrum of time periods and traditions—from English and American to Mexican, West African and European literary cultures. By turns trope, metaphor, and emblem of technological progress, these textual and visual representations of the train serve at times to index racial and gender inequalities, to herald the arrival of a nation’s independence, and at still others to evince the trauma of industrialization. In each instance, the figure of the train emerges as a complex narrative form engaged by artists who were “Reading & Writing the Rails” as a way of assessing the competing discursive investments of cultural modernity.
eBook
The railroad in American fiction: an annotataed bibliography
As the nineteenth century rolled into the twentieth, perhaps nothing captured the spirit of American enterprise so well as the thunder of trains across the continent. As dominant in the popular imagination as it was in daily life, the railroad also enjoyed particular favor among fiction writers; for a time, fictional renderings of life on the rails were plentiful and varied. But as the twentieth century progressed and the railroad lost its status, railroad fiction all but faded away. Today, it is hard to recapture the feelings that train travel once produced, or the details of its reign. In this regard, rail fiction constitutes an invaluable resource. In many cases written by those who actually worked on the railroad, these stories provide realism and a level of technical authenticity not readily available elsewhere. This extensively annotated bibliography lists and discusses works from the 1840s to the 21st century. It provides detailed entries on 956 works of fiction, including both novels and short stories, either devoted entirely to the railroad or containing significant and notable passages about it. Each entry includes plot and character descriptions with a view to allowing the reader to make an informed decision on the source's merit. A detailed introduction discusses the history of railroad fiction and highlights common themes such as strikes, innovations, hoboes and rail heroes. Leading writers of railroad fiction Harry Bedwell, Frank Packard and Cy Warman are well represented along with writers of wider scope such Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe. An appendix organizes entries by decade of publication, and the work is indexed by subject and title.
eBook